PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) is a multiplayer online battle royale video game developed and published by Bluehole. The game is based on previous mods that were developed by Brendan "PlayerUnknown" Greene for other games using the 2000 film Battle Royale for inspiration, and expanded into a standalone game under Greene's creative direction. In the game, up to one hundred players parachute onto an island and scavenge for weapons and equipment to kill others while avoiding getting killed themselves. The available safe area of the game's world decreases in size over a match, directing surviving players into tighter areas and forcing encounters. The last player or team standing wins the round.

The game was released for Microsoft Windows on Steam's early access program in March 2017, selling over eight million copies within five months. Bluehole plans console releases following the full release of the Windows version, with an Xbox One version by the end of 2017 with publishing support by Microsoft Studios, and for the PlayStation 4at a later date.

Videos

Gameplay

Battlegrounds is an action game in which up to one hundred players fight in a battle royale, a type of large-scale last man standing deathmatch where players fight to be the last alive. Players can choose to enter the match solo, or with a small team of up to four people. In either case, the last person or team left alive wins the match.

Each match starts with players parachuting from a plane onto a map area approximately 8 by 8 kilometres (5.0 mi × 5.0 mi) in size,^[1] The plane's flight-path across the map varies with each round, requiring players to quickly determine the best time to parachute out.^[2] Players start with no gear beyond customized clothing selections which do not affect gameplay. Once they land, players can search buildings and other sites to find weapons, vehicles, armor, clothing, and other equipment. These items are procedurally distributed throughout the map at the start of a match, with certain high-risk zones typically having better equipment.^[2] Killed players can be looted to acquire their gear as well.^[2] Players can opt to play either from the first-person or third-person perspective, each having their own advantages and disadvantages in combat and situational awareness; though server-specific settings can be used to force all players into one perspective to eliminate some advantages.^[2][3]

Every few minutes, the playable area of the map begins to shrink down towards a random location, with any player caught outside the safe area taking damage over time and eventually being eliminated if the player does not enter the safe zone; in game, the players see the boundary as a shimmering blue wall that contracts over time.^[4] This forces players into a more confined area, increasing the chances of encountering other players.^[2] During the course of the match, random regions of the map are highlighted in red and bombed, posing a threat to players that remain in that area.^[5] In both cases, players are warned a few minutes before these events, giving them time to relocate to safety.^[6] At random, a plane will fly over various parts of the playable map and drop a loot package, containing items which are typically unobtainable during normal gameplay. These packages emit highly visible red smoke, drawing interested players near it and creating further confrontations.^[2] On average, a full round takes no more than 30 minutes.^[6]

At the completion of each round, players gain in-game currency based on how long they survived, how many other players they had killed, and how much damage they dealt to other players. The currency is used to purchase crates which contain cosmetic items for character customization.

Development

Lead designer Brendan Greene, better known by his online handle PlayerUnknown, had previously created the ARMA 2 mod DayZ: Battle Royale, an offshoot of popular mod DayZ, and inspired by the 2000 film Battle Royale.^[7][8] At the time he created DayZ: Battle Royale around 2013, Irish-born Greene had been living in Brazil for a few years as a photographer, graphic designer, and web designer, and played some video games such as Delta Force: Black Hawk Down and America's Army.^[9][10] The DayZ mod caught his interest, both as a realistic military simulation and its open-ended gameplay, and started playing around with a custom server, learning programming as he went along.^[9] Greene had been inspired to create the Battle Royale mod as he found that in most multiplayer first-person shooter games, there was too much repetition, as maps were small and easy to memorize. He wanted to create something with more random aspects so that players would not know what to expect, creating a high degree of replayability; this was done by creating vastly larger maps that could not be easily memorized, and using random item placement across it.^[11] Greene also was inspired by an online competition for DayZ called Survivor GameZ, which featured a number of Twitch.tv and YouTube streamers fighting until only a few were left; as he was not a streamer himself, Greene wanted to create a similar game mode that anyone could play.^[11] His initial efforts on this mod were more inspired by The Hunger Games novels, where players would try to vie for stockpiles of weapons at a central location, but moved away from this partially to give players a better chance at survival by spreading weapons around, and also to avoid copyright issues with the novels.^[8] In taking inspiration from the Battle Royale film, Greene had wanted to use safe square areas, but his inexperience in coding led him to use circular safe areas instead, which persisted to Battlegrounds.^[8]

When DayZ became its own standalone title, interest in his ARMA 2 version of the Battle Royale mod trailed off, and Greene transitioned development of the mod to ARMA 3.^[9] Sony Online Entertainment (now the Daybreak Game Company) had become interested in Greene's work, and brought him on as a consultant to develop on H1Z1, licensing the Battle Royale idea from him.^[9] In February 2016, Sony Online split H1Z1 into two separate games, the survival mode H1Z1: Just Survive, and the battle royale-like H1Z1: King of the Kill, around the same time that Greene's consultation period was over.^[12]

Separately, the South Korean studio Ginno Games, led by Chang-han Kim and which had developed massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) for personal computers, had been acquired in January 2015 by Bluehole, a major South Korean publisher of MMOs and mobile games.^[13][14] Kim recognized that producing a successful game in South Korea generally meant it would be published globally, and wanted to use his team to create a successful title for personal computers that was following the same model that other mobile games published by Bluehole had found. He had already been excited about making a type of battle royale game after he had played DayZ, in part that the format had not caught on in Korea. He also wanted to make this through an early access model and have a very limited development schedule to get the game out as fast as possible, while treating the product as a "game as a service" model to be able to support it for many years.^[13] In researching what had been done, he came across Greene's mods and reached out to him.^[13]

Around the same time that Greene had left Sony Online, Kim contacted and offered him the opportunity to work on a new battle royale concept. Within a week, Greene had flown out to Bluehole's headquarters in Korea to discuss the options, and a few weeks later, became the creative director of Bluehole. He moved to South Korea to oversee development.^[11] According to Greene, this was the first time a Korean game studio has brought aboard a foreigner for a creative director role, and while a risk, he states his relationship with Bluehole's management is strong, allowing Greene's team to work autonomously with minimal oversight.^[6]

Development began in early 2016, with plans to have the game ready within a year.^[15] The game was publicly announced in June 2016.^[16] Kim served as executive producer for the game.^[11] Bluehole started with a team of about 35 developers supporting Greene's work, but which as of June 2017 has expanded to 70 and expected to increase again to 90 with a new studio based in Madison, Wisconsin;^[17] Greene said that many of these developers are voluntarily putting in longer work hours into the game due to their dedication to the project and not by any mandate from Greene or Bluehole's management.^[11][18] In addition to Bluehole, Greene also credits Bohemia Interactive, the developers of ARMA and DayZ, for support with motion capture animations via their Prague studio.